Philosophy of Art: Could Neo-Dadaism be considered Postmodernism?

Yes, it could be, especially as a liminal movement.

It's important to understand that post-modernism isn't anti-modernism.

They both stand in opposition to the certainty of Enlightenment thinking, they both use introspection (expressionism in modernism, self-referentiality in post-modernism), parody/satire, and reprise, etc... as central devices.

So for Neo-Dada, and it's always best to use particular examples-- so take Robert Rauschenberg's Bed from 1955. This obvious owes a debt to Marcel Duchamp as a readymade -- hence the term 'neo-dada'. He has taken what is ostensibly his bed, and turned it into a work of art with paint with pen: a violent devastation of the object such that it can no longer serve its original function, framed it and put it up on the wall.

So why is this post-modernism rather than modernism?

In 1969, Leo Steinberg used the term postmodernism to defined Rauschenberg's "flatbed" picture plane, contains a plurality of artifacts that had not been compatible with the pictorial field of premodernist and modernist painting.

Art as bearing a ideal of unity, an ideal of medium specificity, of is abandoned in favor of the postmodern ideal of the artwork as an assemblage constructed from a multitude of heterogenous segments: these segments do not need to be of the same medium, code, style, etc... as in Rauschenberg's Bed, paint is cheek to cheek with a bed quilt. The form of this new work of art is constituted by multiplicity, a medley of incongruous elements in collage which produce an ambiguity.

So now, with neo-dada, we no longer have an ironic twist of concept and presentation to turn a functional object into a work of art (as with Duchamp et al.)

Instead the functional (also the ethical, and the political) with met with the purely formal to create an unstable cacophony.

/r/askphilosophy Thread